Self-Help with Facebook's Self Service Ads

Here's today&39;s latest Social Media Insider from MediaPost. You can see more discussion of these ads in the previous post.

The self-service ad model may not be the
secret to Facebook&39;s future fortunes, but it presents marketers with
some largely untapped opportunities for reaching the most precisely
targeted audiences online.

If you talk to Facebook&39;s users
about advertising, you&39;ll hear a number of criticisms. Some say it&39;s
brash or irrelevant. Many others don&39;t notice it at all. I&39;d expect
many consumers wouldn&39;t even think of the best ads as advertising, such
as those ads for TV show or movie premieres on the homepage where you
RSVP if you&39;re going. Some of the worst problems with the site&39;s
advertising have been minimized, such as those in my musings last
summer on Facebook&39;s &39;Jewhavioral&39; targeting and overly personal weight loss ads.

Forrester&39;s
Marketing Forum last month provided me with an excuse to run another ad
trial, as I demoed the platform to an attendee during a break and wound
up creating a live campaign. I was covering the event as a blogger (read the roundup), so I had something to offer. Here are a few things I learned in the process. You can view screen shots from the campaign on Flickr or SlideShare.

• Facebook self-service ads remain as easy
  as ever to create. While I can&39;t say my ad copy was perfectly written,
  putting up something passable took all of a few minutes. There have
  been few changes since the service launched.

• The
  targeting options such as Keywords and Workplaces allow precise ways to
  reach consumers volunteering this information. I had the campaign
  target people working at Forrester Research, which brought up about 400
  people in the United States. Most advertisers won&39;t want to cast such
  narrow nets, but the option&39;s there.

• Creating similar
  ads is also a cinch. I used this feature to create five versions, all
  of which are shown on Flickr and SlideShare. These include ads
  targeting Forrester&39;s competitors, and one targeting Forrester
  employees in the Netherlands.

• Expect low CPMs.
  Recommended bids ranged from 30 cents to 46 cents. I set my bids
  significantly higher since I was targeting fewer than 1,500 people
  through the various versions of the ads. I tried entering various other
  keywords and targeting options and couldn&39;t find anything higher than
  50 cents. More precise targeting does not lead to higher recommended
  bids.

• 
  
• The actual CPM after a week was 60 cents across
  the campaign. If Facebook is able to reach its $5 billion valuation,
  it&39;s not coming from advertisers like me.